Little Girl Lost 6: The Return of Johnnie Wise (34 page)

She walked into the hotel lobby, her Wall Street Journal folded neatly and tucked under her arm, and went up to the counter. Gloria Schumacher was sitting in a chair reading an Agatha Christie mystery, much like she was doing the day before. “Hi, Gloria.”

Without looking at her, she said, “Hello, Johnnie. Give me a minute to finish this page.”

“Okay. Take your time.”

A moment or two later, she dog-eared the page, closed the book, and set it down behind the counter. She exhaled like she had just finished eating a satisfying meal and said, “What can I do for you?”

“I’m wondering if you have a typewriter.”

“I do. I’ve been trying to write a novel with it for over ten years now. Agatha Christie and other women authors have inspired me to start writing, but not one of them has inspired me to finish. I have many ideas that would make great stories, but I can never get past fifty pages. Now . . . tell me why
you
need to use it. Is it to write about what happened in New Orleans? That would be a bestseller, I’m sure.”

“So you heard about the trial, huh?”

“I did. Linda couldn’t wait to call this morning.”

“Okay, well, I just need to type up a stock portfolio for Lucille’s husband, Hank. He’s agreed to let me handle his investments for him.”

“Hmph. And what is Lucille saying about all this? Is she investing, too?”

“No. She’s decided to see how things go for Hank first.”

“Sounds reasonable to me. Money’s hard to come by, especially for Negroes. I’ve gotta tell ya, I’m at a loss as to why Lucille would let Hank do such a foolhardy thing with their money.”

“Money
is
hard to come by, Gloria, and that’s all the more reason to invest and watch it grow and set up a wonderful future for yourself. And I suppose you and Lucille might be right to wait too, but it would make more sense to do it now and save herself eleven hundred dollars. By waiting, I’ll end up making twenty-two hundred more dollars to invest.”

“You’re not going to give her a break, Johnnie?”

“I am giving her a break, but she won’t take it. If she invests now, I’ll do both portfolios for a one-time payment of eleven hundred. But if I have to do the same work twice, I’ll have to charge twice for twice the work. That’s only fair, Gloria. I’m sure you’d have to agree.”

“I guess, if you have to do twice the work, but that’s an awful lot of money, Johnnie. I must say you’re quite driven for a young woman of seventeen years.”

“One must strike while the iron is hot or miss an opportunity that may never come again. So, may I use your typewriter?”

“I don’t see why not. I’m not using it. It just sits there in my back office collecting dust. Wait right here. I’ll pack it up for you, and you can take it with you.”

“Thank you. I would hate to have to walk over to Woolies, and I probably wouldn’t, which means I couldn’t get anything typed up until tomorrow after I get off work. I wanna take something to Hank in the morning that way he knows I’m on top of everything.”

Gloria walked into the back room, and as if it were an after thought, she said over her shoulder, “What’s going on with you and the evangelist?”

“What’s going on with me and the evangelist? What do you mean?”

“I saw you two getting out of his truck last night,” she said when she came back into the lobby. She put the typewriter on the counter and continued. “And I just saw you getting out of his truck again a few minutes ago. Did he give you a lift home from the restaurant or what?”

“Yes.”

Looking her in the eyes now, suspicious of illicit activity at her hotel, Gloria said, “And where was he giving you a ride from last night?”

“Why didn’t you ask me for something to eat? I had plenty. You could have eaten as much as you wanted without fearing for your life.”

“I started to stop by, but I thought you had been so generous already, and I didn’t want to take advantage of you. I had a few dollars, and I could afford to buy a meal.”

“So, you risked your life by going to a redneck restaurant instead of coming to me? Why that makes no sense at all. From now on, you’ll have dinner with me, okay? I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. Plus, I’d really like to have some company. I was thinking we could discuss the books we’ve read. How does that sound?”

“It sounds wonderful, Gloria. And I’ll be glad to pay for my meals. Business is business.”

“Don’t worry about paying me, Johnnie. I’m glad to do it.”

“And I appreciate that, but I gotta pay my own way in life. If I didn’t have any money or a job, that would be one thing. But I have both. I can’t live off you.”

Chapter 64

The Desire to be Professional

J
ohnnie entered her hotel room at about four that afternoon and tossed her Wall Street Journal on the coffee table. Then she carefully set the typewriter on the dining table near the picture window. She wanted something sweet, so she tore open the bag of Brach’s Orange Slices she had purchased the previous day at Woolies and tossed one in her mouth. She moved it around, sucking off the sugar, savoring the taste as she took off her clothes and hung them up. Nude now, she went into the bathroom and turned the faucets on. While the water heated to her desirable temperature, she grabbed a white towel and wrapped her hair in it. Then she put her hand under the running water—perfect. She grabbed two more towels. She laid one on the floor at the edge of the tub.

After lathering the towel, she washed herself as Paul Masterson’s image came into view. She couldn’t help thinking about him and the chat they had not long ago. While she admired his passion, she thought that the things he believed about the future were fundamentally off kilter. It just didn’t make sense that the world and the women in it could change so radically and so quickly. According to what she learned in school, Lincoln had freed the slaves nearly a hundred years earlier, and the Negro was still catching hell—so were women. If the thinking in white America hadn’t changed much in three hundred years, why would it all of sudden change dramatically by 1974, twenty years from now. That’s why she didn’t buy what Masterson was selling.

Then Johnnie remembered that she and Sadie had visited a fortune-teller who moonlighted as an abortionist. Her named was Madam De Mille. She had gotten pregnant, and she wanted to get rid of the child that was growing in the wall of her uterus. That’s when it occurred to her that other girls she had known were having sex before she had—at least that’s what she had heard in the school lavatory, where the girls openly talked about such things. She realized then that if any of the sexually active girls got pregnant, they would be faced with a similar decision. And even though the procedure was very painful, having a child out of wedlock was so shameful that having it cut out of her was more desirable than going through the humiliation of everyone knowing she was having sex and was with child.

With that in mind, she remembered that Paul had said abortion would be big business. That’s where she drew the line. Sure, she had heard that a few girls at school were having sex, but the majority of the girls she knew were not. The real truth was that she hadn’t seen any evidence that any teenaged girl was having sex. Looking back on it now, she realized it was nothing but talk. She knew that girls often told salacious tales on the girls they didn’t like or were jealous of, saying they had sex with boys, knowing full well they were lying with the intention of ruining reputations. The boys were just as guilty as the girls who told such tales because when it got out that they supposedly had sex with a girl, they stuck their chests out, believing that having sex, even made up sex, somehow made them a man in the eyes of their peers. But the poor girl who had been lied on was called a whore—and it stuck, like the jingle of a Coca-Cola commercial.

The majority of the girls she knew were good churchgoing girls who were just as chaste as she used to be. She didn’t believe that most women and teenaged girls were whores who had sex with more men than they had thumbs. That’s what whores did. The only whores she knew of besides herself and her mother were men and hot-to-trot teenaged boys. And the only reason there were so many male whores was because of prostitution, not because women and girls who put out were a dime a dozen. From what she had seen, men and young boys were the ones running from woman to woman or from teenaged girl to teenaged girl,
trying
very hard to get them to go all the way.

As far as she was concerned, if her mother hadn’t forced her into a relationship with Earl Shamus, she would still be a virgin. She wouldn’t have even let Lucas do it to her, let alone Napoleon Bentley and Martin Winters. And she certainly wouldn’t have given much thought to having sex with Paul Masterson. But now the genie, as it were, was out of the bottle, and she had needs. That’s why she might have let Paul have his way with her, and then took a little for herself, just enough to make him think it was his idea, but enough to get the satisfaction physical joining engendered.

The way she saw it, there was no way girls and women were going to get pregnant so often that abortion would become legal and big business as Paul asserted. For that to happen, for women and girls to start acting like men and boys, something diabolical would have to happen; something like American Slavery or the continental United States would have to be invaded by a brutal regime like the Third Reich. If either of those historical events happened again, she just might believe it. However, as things stood at the moment, she couldn’t think of anything that would make women behave like licentious men.

She let the water run all over her body until all traces of soap were gone. Then she turned off the faucets, slid the curtain to the left, and stepped out of the tub and onto the towel. She wiped the residual water off her body, careful to dry between her toes. She grabbed the hooded pink bathrobe she purchased at Woolies and went into the living room area of what she thought was her two room apartment and sat on the couch. Then, she started reading her Wall Street Journal. Martin Winters had told her that The American Stock Exchange had started in the 1800s and that Dow Jones had been around since 1882. She looked at the stocks she previously owned to see how they were doing. General Electric, General Motors, Coca-Cola Corporation, and Buchanan Mutual were all doing well. So were the rest.

She took the paper over to the dining table, sat down, and unpacked the typewriter and the paper. It was black and looked very old. A logo and the word “Royal” were stenciled on the carriage and the key well. Although she had seen Cynthia, Martin Winters’ secretary, typing when she went to his office, she had no idea how to type—at least not efficiently. She just knew that Cynthia must have been really good because she typed rapidly and as naturally as she breathed. Nevertheless, she felt confident she could at least put paper into the machine and get started because she had watched Cynthia do it many times. She also knew that when she heard a bell ring, it was time to return the carriage.

She put a piece of paper in and turned the carriage until she could see the edge coming up, but it was crooked. It had looked so simple when Cynthia did it, but she had already wasted fifteen minutes, and now it was finally straight. She closed her eyes and visualized what Cynthia had done, where she kept her hands. They were always on the same lettered keys on the second row. She unfolded the Wall Street Journal and tried to type the words she saw. She typed a letter, and then looked at the paper to see if she had hit the correct key. She hit another and looked at the paper again. She did this for over an hour, but she hadn’t made much progress. Her typing looked like the Hebrew language by the time she finished one paragraph. Undeterred, she tried again and again, but there were so many mistakes that she couldn’t read any of the sentences she had typed. Frustrated, she gave up and decided to read some of Agatha Christie’s
Murder on the Orient Express.
That way, if Gloria wanted to discuss it over dinner, she would have something to add to the conversation.